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• 1 2021-03-30T11:16:08-07:00 Marble Fragments from the Ancient Map of Rome (3 of 3) 25 Frammenti di Marmo della Pianta di Roma Antica plain 2024-10-10T13:18:49-07:00 Frammenti di marmo della Pianta di Roma antica, scavati saranno due secoli nelle Rovine del Tempio di Romolo, et ora esistenti nel Museo di Campidoglio.; Piranesi Archit(etto) dis(egnò) et inc(ise). Marble Fragments from the ancient Map of Rome excavated two centuries ago from the Ruins of the Temple of Romulus, and now in the Capitoline Museum.; Drawn and engraved by the Architect Piranesi
  In the final image of this subject, Piranesi reorients viewers with a wider, horizontal image, and dispenses with the use of the dividers between groups of fragments. Here, fragments are much more spread out, perhaps invoking placement on a tabletop. Viewers, like Piranesi, are invited to analyze, organize, and place them in the larger collection of fragments rather than contend with divisions that are unclear or transgressed, as in the first image in the group. 
  
  Including the third and final of Piranesi’s renditions of the Marble Plan in her history of information graphics, Sandra Rendgen calls attention to the high level of abstraction and expertise required of such images and argues that this and other informative images have long held “a central position—between the scholarly text on the one hand and the artistic image on the other—as an intellectual instrument of Western culture” (Rendgen 14). Piranesi repeatedly merges text and image throughout this volume, and these three images are only legible when they are viewed together with the indices that identify their numbered fragments. While Piranesi can be appreciated as a mapmaker, he was first and foremost a maker of books. As Heather Hyde Minor reminds us, “Put simply, he [Piranesi] made books. They were the currency of his artistic fortune in the 1700s” (Hyde Minor 2023, 95). The fragments in these three images might cross the metal dividers separating each image’s collection or, in this image, resist such hints of classification, but they are all structured by Piranesi’s patterns of annotation and cross-reference that link text and image. 
  
  The Severan Marble Plan remains a source of fascination for those interested in ancient Rome, and its varied modes of display have become part of its history. In January 2024, the Forma Urbis Museum opened in the Parco Archeologico del Celio, under the direction of the Capitoline Superintendence for Cultural Heritage of Roma Capitale. While the original Severan marble plan was mounted onto a wall, Piranesi’s own marble fragments were printed on pages and bound in books, the fragments today are illuminated underfoot and below glass, with a rendering of Giovanni Battista Nolli’s Pianta di Roma above. Phenomenologically, this new mode of viewing challenges viewers to transverse the ancient city atop its marble map, instead of from below. Scholars involved in designing the Forma Urbis Museum faced the same task as Piranesi: identifying and making sense of fragments. Much like Piranesi, contemporary scholars of the Severan Marble Plan are faced with the same alternation between fantasy and accuracy. Piranesi’s presentation of three printed pages of marble fragments merges the taxonomic and evocative possibilities of the fragment with the cross-referenced logic of book design and a variety of visual compositions across individual pages. (PC & SAH) 
  
  To see this image in the first volume of Le Antichità Romane, volume 1 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.